Early Freeze Leaves Mississippi Cluttered With Stranded Vessels

January 28, 1986|By Knight-Ridder Newspapers.

LA CROSSE, WIS. — America has ice running through its most important vein. The Upper Mississippi River, which in warmer weather washes the feet of high bluffs and devours its own banks, is now a frozen crack in the earth.

Between St. Paul, Minn., and Quincy, Ill., covering 512 miles of river, the Mississippi has been left to the only brave souls who will have anything to do with it at this time of year: ice fishermen and eagle watchers.

Days are lingering a little longer now, but the snow-blanketed riverbed is obliterated in blinding whiteness, indistinguishable from the valley.

``You get up,`` said William Chambers, ``you do a little bit of what there is to be done, you know, try to keep things kind of cleaned up a little bit, one thing and another, and that`s about it, you know.``

Chambers is a pilot on the Valda, a towboat that, like the barges and the once-thriving towing industry, is dead in the water. Chambers is locked in by ice, the industry by economic conditions that have killed off nearly 20 percent of the nation`s barge and tow companies in the last two years.

Chambers and eight other crew members left St. Paul three days before Thanksgiving and headed toward the Ohio River and Cincinnati. They were pushing two barges, each containing 2,800 tons of liquid asphalt heated to 350 degrees.

The Valda had covered only 15 miles when the winter`s first freeze gripped the region. Caught off-guard by winter`s early arrival, the boats spent four days banging, crushing and chiseling the rapidly hardening ice round the clock.

``We were hitting it like a mad billy goat,`` Chambers recalled. ``About as fast as you bust it out, it freezes back up.``

The river took on the sounds of a construction site as 365-ton, 4,600-horsepower towboats rammed 1,500-ton barges into thick packs of ice, then backed up and rammed again.

Boats that were shoving several barges tried to separate and shuttle them, two at a time, through locks made ornery by rapidly forming ice.

Breaking up barges was exhausting work for deckhands who lashed and unlashed stiff steel cables while their hands fought numbness and their boots sought firm purchase against the slippery glaze underfoot.

``I`m standing out there and the temperature is 20 degrees below freezing,`` Valda deckhand Joseph Glascox recalled, ``and I`ve got a 30-mile- an-hour coming at me, and 50- to 60-below wind chill. . . . It makes you realize just how crazy you are.``

On Nov. 29, the Valda, no longer able to penetrate ice formations that rose above the prows of its barges, quit the fight and faced the inevitable. The crew shut off the heaters beneath the asphalt and tied up for the winter here, 125 miles and usually less than a day`s trip south of St. Paul.

About 500 loaded barges and 16 towboats are anchored in for the winter.

At least the Valda is still afloat. In mid-December, the towboat L. Wade Childress, tied to shore at Ft. Madison, Ia., sank, battered into submission during the struggle to shuttle barges through the ice.

There have been freezes that caught more boats in their grip.

``But I can never remember this many boats in the ice this early,`` said Burton F. Morris, who recently retired after 20 years as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers` lockmaster here.

The Mississippi, as it snakes more than 2,400 miles from Minnesota`s Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico, has carried the land`s commerce since the days when Indians in canoes used it as their causeway. And each winter, the freeze has shut down its northern reaches.

That this year`s freeze came earlier than anyone can remember is more than a mere historical footnote. It also is proving extremely costly. The earlier the freeze, the longer the boats and barges are out of commission.

Stewart Sumpton, president of the Upper Mississippi Waterways Association, which represents barge lines, figures that the idled barges could have earned about $8 million in freight revenues had they been able to reach the still-flowing Lower Mississippi, Ohio and Illinois Rivers.

In addition, grain companies that were expecting to sell the corn and soybeans now stored on most of the stranded barges (a few have petroleum, ammonia and other products) won`t see that revenue until after the thaw.

Each barge holds the equivalent of about 50,000 bushels of grain, making each barge of corn worth about $120,000 and each barge of soybeans worth more than twice that on today`s market.

Frozen, the towboats and barges are symbolic of an industry that has been going nowhere fast for several years now.

``This,`` Sumpton said of early the freeze, ``just added to the gloom.``

Since about 1980, the towboat and barge industry has had too many empty barges bidding for too little business.

The glut of barges was created by federal tax policies from the mid-1970s that provided shelters for people who invested in barge construction, said Joseph A. Farrell, president of the American Waterway Operators Association in Arlington, Va.